The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (43 page)

As she slid on a pair of dry jeans, she tried not to think about how she would have put them in the dryer to warm up if the generator had started. And then she could have thrown in the wet clothes. They’d have dried in less than half an hour.

Izzy hadn’t made a peep since she came in. She must have sensed that Erin was in a mood.

“You hungry?”

Izzy nodded. When Erin opened the cabinet door, she was greeted by a very limited array of edibles. They hadn’t gone picking for food in days. She’d been too fixated on the generator.

“We have beans, beans, and beans.”

They ate cold kidney beans and Saltines for dinner. The unheated food was another reminder of her failure to get the generator running.

She felt drained. Empty. Like someone had taken a cork out of her head and tipped her over, letting her insides spill out.

The storm sucked the light out of the sky, so even though the sun was just setting somewhere behind the heavy curtain of clouds, it was almost as dark as night.

Her hair was still wet when they went to bed. She pushed the damp strands away from her neck and face, sick of the cold. Soon the warmth of sleep overtook her.

Erin dreamed they were scavenging in an old, dusty house. Weathered wood creaked under her feet, and her eyes traced gouges that cut pale lines into the dark floorboards.

She didn’t think she knew the house at first, but then she rounded a corner and saw all the flowers. They were dead now. Drooping and dried into colorless skeletons.

This was the house they had her dad’s funeral in.

She became aware of a noise. Something familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. She followed the sound, skirting around a shriveled fern that reached out from its vase like a papery brown claw.

The noise got louder, but she still couldn’t identify it.

Izzy squeezed her hand, and Erin turned to look at her. Had Izzy been there the whole time?

The kid’s eyes opened wide, and she whispered, “Scary!”

Just like Kelly in Dracula’s Dungeon. This time, Erin shivered.

They came to an opening that led into a living room and saw it finally. It was a TV. An old one. The sound was the static that went with the fuzzy snow when a channel was out. Erin smiled at the familiarity. It was probably the first time anyone had ever been glad to see TV snow.

She found the remote wedged between two of the couch cushions and started flipping channels, hoping to find something that still worked.

Izzy danced in front of the TV, and Erin leaned around her.

“Hey Erin.”

Erin gestured with the remote.

“Move.”

“What’s in there?”

Erin glanced where Izzy was pointing. There was a door across the room.

She went back to channel surfing in the snow.

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t know how much time had passed when she realized Izzy was gone. And the door at the end of the room stood open. Not all the way. Just a few inches. Enough that Erin knew Izzy had slipped through it.

That was when she noticed the sign over the door. The one that said, “Point of No Return(s)!”

It hadn’t been there before, when Izzy first asked about the door. Erin would have noticed that. She would have told Izzy not to go inside. But it was too late now.

She threw the remote down and stood up, approaching the door. Her whole body trembled as she extended her hand toward the door knob. She took a deep breath and held it.

The hinges whined as the door swung open the rest of the way, revealing a pitch black corridor. The lightless labyrinth.

“Izzy?” she called out, and her voice seemed to get swallowed up by the darkness beyond the doorway.

There was no answer.

She knew she had to go in. She had to find Izzy. But her legs were frozen in place.

She tried calling again.

“Izzy?”

She held her breath, straining to hear over the crashing of her heartbeat in her ears.

Why wasn’t she answering?

“Izzy!”

The force of trying to scream in her sleep woke her up. She shook herself awake. Her eyes opened and at first she was surrounded by pitch blackness. Was she in the maze again?

And then the room lit up in blue-white light. Thunder boomed a beat later, rattling the glass in the windows. In the next flash of lightning, Erin looked to her right and noted the lump of Izzy’s form under the blankets. She let her head fall back onto her pillow.

She laid there a while, allowing her breathing to return to normal. But after a few minutes, she gave up on falling back asleep.

The floor was chilly under her bare feet. She pulled on a pair of dry socks and padded out of the room.

At the kitchen window, she looked out into the night and the rain. She could only really see when the lightning flashed.

Izzy was probably right. The generator was likely fried like everything else. Why hadn’t she thought about that before?

It seemed so stupid now. Even if she had been able to get it started, so what? She kept pretending that electricity would somehow solve all of their problems, but that wasn’t true. They still had to find food if they wanted to survive.

Time passed. She knew it must be getting close to dawn, because there was enough light outside that she could finally see a little without the lightning. Everything looked gray in the half-light.

Her eyes wandered from the water dribbling over the gutters to the dwindling store of food in the cabinet. This was only a little rain. What was going to happen when it was snow?

How much food would they need to have on hand to make it through the winter?

She didn’t know.

And how many days had they wasted on the failed generator?

She didn’t want to know.

Baghead

Rural Oklahoma

9 years, 126 days after

He flung himself from the car, hitting the road on his side, his hip bone taking the brunt of it. He bounced once and then skidded over the asphalt, the hot tar and gravel concoction grating at his flesh and clothing. He fought the instinct to dig his feet in or claw at the ground, instead lifting his hands and legs the best he could. Better to let momentum carry him to the shoulder.

As soon as he hit the dirt, he bounced again, flopping face down, his vision obscured by the bag. A bunch of sand poured into the eyeholes, the grit grinding at his face like a dry, power wash version of exfoliating beads.

He skidded to the bottom of the ditch, which wasn’t far, and finally came to a stop. He held still for a moment, almost waiting for a second round of dirt sliding to kick in, and then rolled over onto his back, taking a deep breath as he did so. A bunch of sand spilled into his nose and mouth, though, and caught in his throat. He rolled back over, unzipping the hood at his chin so he could spit the dirt out. The powder burned, especially in his nostrils, and it dried out every mucus membrane that it touched.

He crouched in the vomit position, on hands and knees, for quite a while. No amount of spitting or retching removed all of the dirt from his throat, and no matter how long he kept at it, each brush of his beard flung more grains of sand to the ground.

Finally, he gathered himself and stood. His chest heaved, and he found the top half of his back sore and stiff. Christ. He was exhausted from trying, and failing, to hack up some sand.

A voice spoke behind him:

“You gonna make it, chief?”

He turned to find Delfino standing on the edge of the road above him, the sun at his back in a way that hid his face in shadow. The blacked out face reminded Bags of looking at backlit photographs when he was a kid and everything was still on film.

He looked past Delfino, noting the lack of any 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88s in the vicinity.

“Where’s the car?”

“I told you, man. It ain’t wise to park out here. I found a low spot to park it and jogged up this way. Hopefully the dunes will hide it if anyone passes by.”

Bags nodded.

“Seriously, though, are you OK?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. I’ll be picking sand out of my beard for a month, but I’m OK.”

The wind blew then, and feeling the cool air on his chin, Baghead realized that his bag had been unzipped all this time. He’d forgotten all about it after the sand situation. He turned away from Delfino and zipped it up. A weird tingle rippled in the center of his chest, and a heat crept up onto his cheeks.

He stayed turned away, feeling that warmth in his face, and things got quiet for a moment.

“Should we, uh, go check on this kid? Or do you just want to wait around for a lynch mob?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

41 days before

The landscape reflected the glow from the headlights, wet leaves and blades of grass shimmering like ice sculptures. It felt strange to look on this shininess, this embarrassment of illumination, after all of the time he’d spent in the dark so far this evening. The car’s clock confirmed the time to be 4:37 AM. He couldn’t help but think of turning on the brights in this darkness as the equivalent of shining a flashlight in someone’s face, like the whole world was trying to sleep now, and he was just being obnoxious.

The car moved through the outskirts of town, well away from the riots and the busy streets. Here he found shoddy houses and overgrown vacant lots on the side of the road. Various grasses gone to seed stood waist high, waving as he passed.

He glanced over his shoulder every few seconds, though he knew this to be unnecessary. Two blankets and an afghan swathed the corpse in the back seat, the blankets folded to produce enough layers of cover that an onlooker couldn’t discern the shape of the body underneath. She wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything, but he checked on her anyway. He couldn’t help it.

The engine’s vibration thrummed through the steering wheel and into his hands. Not much. Just enough to make his fingers tingle. He realized that he liked driving, especially alone. He liked being at the controls of a machine of this size and power. He liked the white noise of the engine’s hum against the quiet in the car. He liked putting the window down just a crack and letting the cold air blow along the side of his head, flipping his hair up a little.

Even his headache seemed to get lulled into a stupor as he drove, receding from the off and on throb of stabbing brain pain to more of a dull ache that lingered just above the threshold necessary to be considered annoying. It stayed well below the level of miserable or excruciating, though, so he was happy with that.

As bad as it had tasted, he wished he’d brought along Janice’s pack of cigarettes. He could feel the filter adhered to his lips, see the flame burst from the lighter and lick around the paper and tobacco, smell the smoke. He didn’t know why he wanted any of this. Why didn’t matter in most respects now. He just moved forward. He acted first and saved thinking for something to do to kill time during the lulls.

Now the buildings along the roadside grew more sparse, fields of saplings and brush filling in the empty spaces. He passed a few odd small businesses, a snowmobile dealership, a couple of auto mechanics, a veterinary clinic, but most of the land out here was vacant. Desolate. He hadn’t passed another car in a long time.

He didn’t quite know how he was going to do this. Knowing that her priority was that the boys didn’t see her this way, his first thought had been to find some spot way out of town and put her in a dumpster outside of a gas station or something, but that seemed way too crass. An easy answer, yes, but a disrespectful one. He couldn’t see the police digging too deep on something like a Jane Doe in a dumpster anytime too soon with the city on fire, but there was certainly a possibility that they’d identify her in some way. Maybe that could lead to Matt and Kevin seeing her somehow. Torching her within the dumpster crossed his mind as well, but no. She had expressed her interest in cremation, but it was too messy and too attention grabbing. That would get found right away and might drum up enough outrage among the public to warrant an investigation even with the riots and such going on. So yeah, that was out.

Of course, he would’ve preferred burying her in the yard. At home where she belonged. Not having the time to invest in digging a deep grave, though, he worried a heavy rain might unearth her. Or maybe his sons would get curious about the mound of dirt out back and poke around. Kevin would probably know a shallow grave when he saw one, but would that make him leave it be or even more apt to check it out? Yeah, that was a no go.

He drove on, engine whirring, air sucking through the crack in the window and floofing his hair around. He was not certain of his destination, but he would know it when he saw it. He let his mind wander, let it go blank to the point that he almost forgot about his headache, almost forgot what he was doing out here at all. He watched the dashed line rush past in the middle of the road, the way the yellow paint reflected the glow of the headlights.